Top 10 Reasons People Leave Your Website
by Elana Birnbaum - May 27th, 2011
You work hard to bring traffic to your website. You invest money in online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media and more. However, many basic issues will drive people away from your website and lower conversion. Luckily, many of these problems can be corrected with a bit of work. Take a look at our top 10 list of reasons people leave, and some simple solutions:
1. Your site takes too long to load. Look, we’re all busy people; if a customer has to wait longer than a few seconds for a page to load, they’ll most likely leave. A good first place to check is Webmaster Tools – it takes just a few minutes to enable it for your website. You’ll be able to discover issues such as missing pages and broken links as Google crawls your site. Google also has some great tools to find issues associated with page speed – you can find a list of rules under “documentation” on this page. These include minifying CSS (i.e. compressing the files), combining external files, enabling browser caching and webpage compression. Yahoo also has a list of best practices to improve site speed. These include using high-quality web hosting, removing or updating any missing pages and links, and incorporating style sheets that load more efficiently.